


Keep this fragile flame

by omiceti



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-16
Updated: 2012-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-29 15:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omiceti/pseuds/omiceti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex and Olivia get drunk for Christmas and consider going ice skating. Pre-"Theatre Tricks," 13-11.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep this fragile flame

Around two, your phone rings.

You twist over on the couch, and the display startles you. Olivia. You consider letting it go to voicemail, but then, you’ve done an awful lot of that, and ‘tis the season and all, so, _merry goddamn Christmas,_ you pick up.

“Alex!” she says, and you hear it right away, the haze of vodka over her voice. At least, you haven’t heard her sound this happy while sober since 2002.

“Olivia,” you say, cautiously, “hi.”

“Merry Christmas,” she tells you, too brightly, and it’s not like you’re exactly in an exchanging-holiday-cards sort of relationship with her these days, but she’s probably spending it just like you are: alone. Which is fine. Everything is all quite all right.

“You too, Olivia,” you say, and hold a finger at the edge of your page. Out the window, you can see the sky, pale blue and inviting. It looks warm.

“I’ve been watching a House Hunters marathon on HGTV,” she tells you, and here it comes, you can hear it in her voice: the turn when the vodka gets ugly, becomes less of a friend and more of a mirror. “It made me think of you, you know?”

“Sure,” you say, although you have no idea why HGTV would make Olivia think of you. She usually spends Christmas with Elliot and his family. Maybe not this year. “Sure.”

Her voice sounds tremulous. “Do you…want to come over? We could watch it together.”

Not at all, you think, but maybe it isn’t really true. You always miss your mother at Christmas, and you know she does too. Anyway, you spent last Christmas hooked up to an IV at a field hospital somewhere in North Kivu, more or less out of your mind on expired antivirals, so it probably couldn’t be worse than that.

You slip a bookmark into your Cicero. “Sure, Olivia,” you tell her. “I’ll bring some wine, okay?” You have a couple of bottles you wouldn’t mind re-gifting.

“Really?” she says, sounding surprised. “That would be. It would be nice.”

Who knows, maybe it even would.

*

She’s wearing jeans and a loose brown sweater when she opens the door. “Nice place,” you tell her, recognizing some of the furniture. It’s a little bigger than her old apartment, but still decorated like a cop’s bachelor pad.

“Thanks,” she says, smiles shyly. Behind her, the vodka sits on the coffee table beside a shot glass. On the TV, a woman in an obnoxiously yellow dress is talking about “hex tile,” whatever that is. There isn’t actually much missing from the bottle, and as you look at her, you can see that she’s less drunk than you thought. Maybe what you heard is genuine sadness. Who knows, she’s always sad these days. She always has been, really.

Well, it’s not like you’re much better yourself. “I brought two bottles of Bordeaux,” you say, presenting them with as much of a flourish as you can muster. “Merry Christmas.”

She tilts her head at you. “You hate Bordeaux.”

“Sure,” you tell her, “but you don’t.”

She smiles again. It looks good on her. “You’re right,” she says.

“I know.”

She snorts. “Of course you do,” she says, and your hackles are up right away, but she’s looking at you teasingly, almost affectionately. “Well. Let’s get started on this, then.”

While she pulls down the wine glasses, you sit on her couch, pour and down a quick shot of the vodka, still cold from her freezer. It slides over your tongue in a sweet, poisonous glaze, glosses down your throat, and goes helpfully straight to your head. You remember too late that you couldn’t be bothered to eat earlier.

Ah. It’s already better.

She sits down next to you, plunks the glassware and the wine on the table, pours two very generous glasses. “To something,” she says wryly, hoists her glass.

“Something,” you say, look her in the eye, swallow.

It’s truly bad wine. But she’s almost smiling, and now you’re not alone on Christmas, and maybe it doesn’t matter so much.

*

At the bottom of the second bottle you’re both a little slouched on the couch, not touching, exactly, but not exactly not touching, either.

“I’m starving,” Olivia announces suddenly. “Oh, wow. I’m really. Wow. Hungry.”

You turn to look at her, and then all of a sudden your face is really close to hers. You swallow. “We could go get some food.”

She looks disappointed. “It’s…Christmas, no one’s going to be open.”

“Chinese?”

She perks up. “Yes. Yes. Chinese. That’s a great idea. You were always so brilliant, Alex.”

And that’s sad again, her voice, and then she’s going to make you sad because this is actually all a little much for you, all at once like this, a strange and sudden new turn in this off-again… _thing_ you’ve been trying to figure out for more than a decade now, ah, nothing’s ever been easy with her. Nothing. “Get your coat,” you tell her, before you can let yourself wander too far down that path. You can feel the wine sticking to your teeth. “It’ll be my treat, okay?” It’s the least you owe her. Or maybe she owes you now, you forget which.

She nods. “Okay.”

*

Her neighborhood joint is pretty crowded, actually, you’d forgotten lots of people have Christmas traditions involving movies and Chinese food, but at least you don’t have to wait for a table. You think people might be staring at the two of you, but you know you’re both kind of drunk and Olivia’s always, always had people looking at her, so it’s fine. She leans over the table, and you can see a lot of her cleavage because her sweater is a V-neck. You’re not sure how you didn’t notice that, earlier. Maybe she changed it?

“Let’s get some beer,” she says.

You force your eyes back to her face. “Sure,” you tell her, although part of you thinks that’s probably a bad idea, but who knows, maybe it’s a good idea. Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe you both should have just gotten wasted and gotten this over with a long fucking time ago. Either way, a few Tsingtaos will be good with scallion pancakes.

“Can we take a detour on the way home?” she asks.

“What kind of detour?”

“I wanted to see the tree this year. You know? The skating rink? I keep…forgetting to do that.”

“Olivia.” The beer washes down the lo mein nicely. “That’s not a detour. That’s, I don’t know, that’s on the way back to my place.”

She lifts an eyebrow in what you think is probably a drunken approximation of a sultry glance. “Maybe that’s what I had in mind.”

You start to laugh because that’s kind of the worst idea she’s ever had, and you can tell even though your head is _floating,_ it’s floating.

She looks a little hurt.

“Yeah,” you say, “all right. We’ll go.”

*

It takes almost half an hour to get a cab, of course, and it’s getting dark, but it’s still warm outside, you barely need your scarf. Olivia’s scarf, actually, you took it from her years ago, when it was cold out and you’d forgotten your own in Donnelly’s office. She’d never given it back to you. Typical.

“Global warming,” you mutter, and she turns from the window, says, “Mmm.”

The stars are coming out by the time you pull yourselves out of the cab. There’s one really bright one you can see already, even with the lights of the city – that was one thing about the Congo, they had fucking _bright_ stars – or maybe it’s a planet, you can’t remember, one of them flickers, either way, it’s pretty.

The big tree and the skating rink look just as they always do, lit and glowing. Olivia takes your upper arm gently, pulls you close. Like a friend would. “This is nice,” she says.

“It is,” you agree, and look at the gilded Prometheus under the glittering, dead tree, bringing fire to the people, and a lot of good that did, you think, but the skaters look happy and maybe you are a little bit, too. It’s Christmas, anyway, tidings of comfort and joy to the world and all that.

“I want to go skating,” Olivia murmurs, and sighs. “But I think maybe I had too much to drink. You know?”

“Yeah,” you say. “I think maybe we did.”

“You’ve always been terrible at it anyway,” she says, and suddenly actually giggles a little. It’s a weird sound. Not a bad one, though. “Terrible!”

It’s true. “Yeah,” you say. “It was fun, though, anyway.”

“We should do it soon. Sober. Or at least sort of sober, right?”

“Sure, Liv,” you tell her. “We will.”


End file.
